954-678-8026 Voice Spam Translated

By consumerist.comApril 17, 2006

Hundreds of people across America have received a strange message in Spanish on their cellphone from one number. We hunted down who the number belonged to, got a copy of the message uploaded and now have a translation.

Reader Diego tells us he thinks the voice has a South American accent, either Argentian or Chilean. The message says, as Adam writes, “usted ha agotado todas las opcions, esta llamada ser

desconectada. Gracias.”

Which in english means, “You have exhausted all options, this call will be disconnected. Thank you.”

So… it’s not a marketing pitch as we thought. However, it’s still harassing. We advise any people who are bothered by it to file a police report. We may bust out some of our sleuthing tools and try to figure out who George Martinez is, the person to whom this phone number is registered. We’ll get to that right after we get this darn egg off our face.

UPDATE: Diego may have an explanation for the message, “I have some experience with IVR equipment,” he writes. ” I used to work in telecom before moving to advertising. I suspect someone didn’t program the options correctly so it’s skipping to the “end call” script before running the options menu. Could be worse, if they had left it stuck in a loop.”

Don’t these people notice their spam machine isn’t generating any dinero? Direct marketers should obsess over all their metrics. At least do us the honor of using your illegal tools correctly. We’re not sure whom we loathe more, unethical marketers or marketers with poor form.